Free Kiss Me Hello (Sweetest Kisses) by Grace Burrowes Page A

her that?”
    “Cute, as in, gray hair, nerves of steel, twinkling blue eyes. I think she likes me. Said her grandson has red hair, and he’s brilliant. She’s about this high.” He held his hand out at the height of his own shoulder. “You hungry?”
    He didn’t mention any cute girls, which was a good thing—probably. “Starved, now that you’re asking.”
    Sid followed Luis down to the kitchen, which at least bore a semblance of functionality.
    “Why do you suppose we always come and go through the kitchen door, rather than the front door?” she mused.
    “The house was designed so the kitchen is closer to the barns and buildings,” Luis said. “The house wants us to come and go this way. Did you use up the last of the raspberry jam?”
    The kitchen door was thus closer to the mud—or something worse than mud. “I might have. We should still have some apricot.”
    Luis made a face, because apricot preserves had been classified in one of their frequent squabbles as girl food.
    “You’ve finished your first week here, Luis. Can you dance to it?”
    He was quiet as he assembled a triple-decker PBJ, then stepped away from the counter so Sid could get to work on fixing her own smaller sandwich.
    “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. The usual gang of idiots is missing the worst tier at the bottom. They talk about some of the kids being in gangs, or dealing, or into the cult-worship bullshit, but I get the sense it’s ninety-nine percent talk, which is a relief.”
    Luis wasn’t stupid. Not by any means. “They’re all junior plow jockeys and bake-sale queens?”
    “The whole spectrum is present—the jocks, the nerds, the preppies, the hoods, the lost—but the middle rungs are wider in each group, I guess. The feel of the school is still like a school, not like a juvie hall without uniforms. What’s for dinner?”
    “This is our house. A PBJ is dinner.”
    “It’s Friday, and even in our house, we’re allowed to celebrate the weekend.” Luis screwed the lid back onto the apricot jam, then did the same with the peanut butter, and put them away when Sid had finished making her sandwich. “I could go for a piece of that lime cheesecake.”
    Sid stared at the sandwich she’d made: peanut butter and apricot jam on stale whole wheat, and one slice was the heel, dammit.
    “If we got a dog,” she said, “I could feed him this sandwich, and he’d think it was the greatest treat he’d had all week.”
    “If we got a dog, you’d have to make sure it had all its shots, or DSS would impound him or some shit.”
    The mood in the kitchen went from end-of-week relaxed to sullen-anxious-teenager in a blink.
    “They haven’t called, Luis. I left the worker a message on Monday, according to Hoyle, and there hasn’t been a call back.”
    “Call them again. We’re supposed to go to a review hearing within thirty days of moving out here, and it’s been ten days already.”
    Technically, the workday wasn’t over for fifteen more minutes. Sid passed Luis her sandwich, and while he watched, dialed the number for DSS again. She got voice mail—she always got voice mail—but left the prescribed message and the house number for a return call.
    “Satisfied?” she said, hanging up.
    “I will be satisfied when they close my case and leave me in peace.”
    “There are two ways through that door, Luis. You can turn eighteen, which is more than two years off, or you can let me adopt you. I support either outcome, you know that.”
    He glared at the half of Sid’s sandwich he hadn’t eaten. “Do we have to talk about this now?”
    “We have to talk about it sometime,” she said gently. “You won’t go to counseling, and letting you drift along in foster care for another two years makes the state look bad come federal funding time.”
    “As if I give a rat’s crap how the state looks.”
    “As long as your case is open, Luis, they can come along and move you back to a group home. Bad grades,